That one night (shift) ...

Seems, the night from Saturday to Sunday I did the last night shift on the ambulance during my internship. All other shifts I applied for this month will be at day time. And there are only three obligatory shifts left.

More than every shift before I had the impression that the cases you get depend on the personnel of an ambulance. (I might suspect that the coordination centre decides upon who rides which ambulance but I hope that's not the case.)

Anyway, we had a heavily injured person and other than in former shifts it was the three of us to treat and transport him. (We instantly alarmed a doctor too as required in such a case.) This time it was not the firefighters doing most of the work ... and it was also us and the doctor giving the report to the people at the hospital. The firefighters just came a little later to the hospital too, to pick up "their" doctor again.

In Germany the place (room) where physically heavily traumatised people are treated is called Schockraum and the term refers also to a certain process which I had learned about before but never been a part of myself before. Well, in fact I wasn't more than a bystander this time either but I'm a little proud and happy now. This is what every EMT and paramedic is trained for. Occurs rarely (which in fact is good for the people but less interesting to us).

The way how we perceive the quality of a shift depends on:

• which colleagues are around
• which cases you get
• whether you get required rest

In my eyes this shift was just perfect. We left our site at about 6.30 pm and came back to it some time after 2 am, being called to another case at 3.45 am and (after another short rest) to the last one at 5.20 am, arriving back home just shortly after 6 am. I had time to do the required disinfection during the first break and still could sleep a little too. Also I had time to practise essential skills like loading/unloading the stretcher and preparing infusion bags (something I need to get faster at). Of course I could have wished for other (more difficult) things to practise (putting an IV is something we talked about in the beginning) but an ambulance rarely is a good place to train things one hasn't done before. No, this shift was really perfect.

During the last drive I thought about the cases I had been around at before (having spent more than 130 hours on the ambulance now). It had been a great and (I guess) a typical variety, ranging from elder people with small wounds to kids to a pregnant, an epilepsy, a reanimation, another head trauma patient without A/B/C issues, drunk and incooperative people in the morning (it's a big city after all) or cases of varying violence after an argument. Of course we had to do patient transports too.

I'm glad to have been accepted to do that internship at that little provider, I had quite a good time there.